By 1916, Hamilton was the world’s premier authority on lead poisoning research. Led by academic as well as humanitarian motivations, she worked in Chicago and Paris before receiving a letter in the mail she most likely thought would never come: an offer to work at Harvard University.

“As children we endure a lot and experience a lot, and I think the rest of your life is just reverberations of that original moment,” Seo says. “For me, I’m pretty attentive to how people are responding to things or to me.”

On Oct. 5, HUDS employees went on strike for the first time in more than 30 years, and for the first time ever during the academic year. Many of these employees have been at Harvard for years, even decades—so what has that time looked like?

Compared to many other archaeologists’ work investigating thousands of years into the past, Liebmann’s focus on the archaeology of early Native American encounters with Europeans is practically breaking news.